Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

29 Hants.’ Indeed he was, and the matter of qualification remains vague. The preference probably came about through contacts with Teddy Wynyard. For Horsham in 1899, the club report says that ‘H.V.Prichard also bowled exceedingly well during the greater part of the season, and he was greatly missed towards the end, when absence from Horsham kept him out of the more important matches in which want of his expresses was then felt most keenly.’ This may well have been due to his preparations for Haiti. He took seven for 12 against Burntwood Warriors, six for 29 against Steyning, and six for 66 against Oxford University Authentics – a game in which he also scored 30. This season the Ockley village side, perhaps now too far below the salt, seemed to have disappeared from the fixture list, possibly robbing Hex of a few more wickets. He missed one match in May when he was apparently in Scotland. He would not have been shooting in May, and very possibly this was when they disposed of the flat in Edinburgh. And on 9 June 1899 Horsham played H.Prichard’s XI – in summary the scores were Prichard’s side 251 for five declared, Horsham 197 for three. It was the only one-day game drawn by the club all summer, and the annual report described it as ‘that most unsatisfactory and inconclusive of all cricket contests, when each side can only get through the half of one innings in a whole day, the one side with four or five wickets down closing their innings, the other losing the same number of wickets by the end of the day.’ It was to be a long time before limiting the overs was seen as a solution to this problem. Hex’s team was a mixture of some of his friends and local cricketers. Johnnie Millais played, as did E.W.Hornung. Four of them, including Hex, had played in the Sussex Second XI game two seasons earlier. The other three were C.L.A.Smith, later the Sussex captain; Arthur Ridsdale, who made a century for Hex’s team; and Arthur Somerset, the owner of Castle Goring, who played a respectable number of first-class games, mainly for Sussex. Also there were Mr Dewing, the solicitor; Arthur Havers, who played a few games for Oxfordshire; and H.L.Havers, probably his brother, who appears on CricketArchive through one game for the Gentlemen of Sussex. The team was made up by W.R.Campion, a local gentleman, and T.Labouchere. Overall, in 1899 Hex took 33 wickets for Horsham at 12.39. This was the end of his regular cricket for Horsham, though he returned for a couple of games in 1902, but he had played a fair amount of cricket between 1896 and 1899: he had played for Horsham, for the Free Foresters, even for the Allahakbarries and the Authors. The Allahakbarries were J.M.Barrie’s occasional cricket team of writers and artists, early celebrity cricket. Barrie took the game seriously enough, but some of his players were keen but hopeless, with Hex one of two or three decent cricketers who turned out from time to time. On 19 May 1899, Hex had his first game for the Allahakbarries against the Artists – he took five wickets then made 26. It is also the first game recorded in the Allahakbarries’ scorebook held at Lord’s. It is one of those scorebooks where different pages are filled by different people. Sometimes they have Horsham to Haiti